Something I’ve been kicking around lately in my writing is a greater appreciation for older writers and the perspective they share about the second half of life.

George Bernard Shaw once said that “youth is the most precious thing in life; It is too bad it has to be wasted on young folks.” I agree with Shaw in this respect: our culture indulges in the dreaminess and idealism of youth when we should be better preparing young people for the compromises and practicalities of adult life.

Young people should be learning how to take care of themselves, make a living, pay their bills, begin and sustain relationships, all of the adult things that our culture is letting them put off as much as possible. The culture also needs to support young people beginning this journey by making it more affordable to get an education, buy homes and have children, but that’s how ridiculous our culture has become: we make it impractical for young people to fully grow up, then we complain about their extended childhoods.

Even if it’s deferred, adulthood starts eventually for everyone and people are fully thrown into the material world. Inevitably, the material world disappoints. You can never have enough. The stuff will never make you happy, the work is always exhausting. And that’s where the youth Shaw spoke about returns.

The writers I love most — Michel de Montaigne, Marcel Proust, Leo Tolstoy — dwelled in this material world, found great success in it, but they ultimately found it unfulfilling. They took different approaches to their retreats into the spiritual world, but each of them searched for some kind of deeper meaning in life, beyond the things we can count and compare with others.

It sounds like a simple philosophy of life, learn from the wise old hands who see through life’s mirages. How then do I explain Adrianne Lenker?

Lenker is the front woman of the band “Big Thief” and also a solo artist. In a new “Big Thief” song “Incomprehensible,” Adrianne sings:

In two days, it's my birthday, and I'll be 33

That doesn't really matter next to eternity

But I like a double number, and I like an odd one, too

And everything I see from now on will be something new

And I just can’t get past the fact that Lenker is only 33. I’m not someone who believes in past lives, but Adrianne might convince me otherwise, how else to explain the depth of wisdom she brings to every song? In the final verse of “Incomprehensible,” (and it’s a Lenker trademark to hold the most powerful points for the close,) she gives us this:

I'm afraid of getting older, that's what I've learned to say

Society has given me the words to think that way

The message spirals, don't get saggy, don't get gray

But the soft and lovely silvers are now falling on my shoulder

My mother and my grandma, my great-grandmother, too

Wrinkle like the river, sweeten like the dew

And as silver as the rainbow scales that shimmer purple blue

How can beauty that is living be anything but true?

So let gravity be my sculptor, let the wind do my hair

Let me dance in front of people without a care

Let me be naked alone, with nobody there

With mismatched socks and shoes and stuff stuffed in my underwear

This is Adrianne in an usually joyful state of mind and it’s beautiful to behold. About five years ago, I introduced a teacher at the Old Town School of Music to Big Thief. He listened to three albums and responded to me the next day, incredulously “every song is great. How is that possible?” It’s possible because Adrianne is an evolved form of consciousness, I’m convinced.

Take, for example, the song “Mythological Beauty” from the band’s second album. It’s a song about her mother, who was 22 when she had Adrianne. It’s maybe the most beautiful tribute to a parent I’ve ever heard from a musician. The empathy in the opening verse is overwhelming:

You have a mythological beauty

You have the eye of someone I have seen

Outside of ordinary situations

Even outside of dreams

You lie in bed at night and watch the lines of headlights through your screen

There is a child inside you who's trying to raise a child in me

I always like people to tell their own stories, but I have to make an exception for Adrianne. She somehow puts herself into her mother’s mindset and pulls out magic. The song reaches a new level (again) in the final verse where Adrianne shares a terrifying story from her youth.

Precocious little Adrianne, growing up in rural Minnesota, decides at five years old to build a tree house on her own. There’s an accident, Adrianne falls off the tree and lands on a metal spike, which ends up lodged in her head. It’s a moment of pure terror that you might expect someone of Lenker’s talent to express her own feelings about the event.

No. Adrianne keeps the perspective on her mother:

Rented a house in Nisswa, Minnesota

Shrapnel and oil cans, rhubarb in the yard

I built a ladder out of metal pieces

Father was working hard

Standing beneath the oak tree by the front door

You were inside baking bread

Sister came out and put her arms around me

Blood gushing from my head

You held me in the backseat with a dishrag, soaking up blood with your eyes

I was just five and you were twenty-seven

Praying, "Don't let my baby die."

Most people would go through life with this story, perhaps later telling it to a therapist, holding on to their trauma, maybe blaming their parents for neglecting them and putting them in danger. Adrianne enters her mom’s prayers instead.

Even with this empathy, Adrianne sings about her own experiences and feelings most. I’ve seen modern poets rave about the song “anything” from her first solo album for its incredible specificity and use of Old English meter. I agree with all that, but am blown away by something more.

It’s a love song written most likely to another woman, although Adrianne is not explicit in most of her music about her sexuality. But it’s a subversive love song in a very interesting way. She starts off with fragments of their relationship, nothing dramatic, just shared friends and what they are up to, visits to each other’s families, even a small argument they go into over a grocery list.

And then the song reveals itself:

I don’t wanna be the owner of your fantasy

I just wanna be a part of your family

Adrianne in this love song is being as practical as a young person can be. She’s not showering the subject with affection or projecting desires. She’s specifically calling out shared memories and elevating their importance. She is, in a sense, embracing that philosophy for young people I mentioned early, to find joy in the practical, necessary parts of life.

And then this incredible communicator takes it deeper:

I don’t wanna talk about anything

I don’t wanna talk about anything

I wanna kiss kiss your eyes again

wanna witness your eyes lookin

I don’t wanna talk about anyone

I don’t wanna talk about anyone

I wanna sleep in your car while you’re driving

lay in your lap when I’m crying

But the song has one last surprise waiting for us. Despite her embrace of the practical and her desire for the softly physical, Adrianne does see something transcendent in this relationship. She just wants to earn the mythological by grounding her song first.

Once again in the final verse, Adrianne lowers the boom, here with some of the most gorgeous poetry she’s ever penned:

weren’t we the stars in heaven

weren’t we the salt in the sea

dragon in the new warm mountain

didn’t you believe in me?

You held me the whole way through

but I couldn’t see the words like you

I was scared, indigo, but I wanted to

I was scared, indigo, but I wanted to

The final verse hits like an invented private language, words only her beloved can fully interpret that still feel universal.

I have no idea who Adrianne wrote this song to and for, but my intuition is that it’s the same person who she later addressed in the song “Sadness as a Gift.” That song begins with what feels like a continuation of this story:

you and I both know 

there is nothing more to say

chance has shut her shining eyes

and turned her face away

All of which makes the rest of the song tragic. Adrianne knows that there is nothing that can bring back what was lost — the domestic paradise of “anything.” But Adrianne still wishes nothing more than to hear from her lost love, knowing how painful that will be. She hints that she even misses the storminess of their time together with this:

been searching for your eyes

all I see is blue sky

It’s probably the only lyric in poetry or music that speaks of clear blue skies as something dull and uninteresting.

Again in the final verse, Adrianne destroys our peace of mind:

kiss so sweet so fine

you could hear the music inside my mind 

and you showed me a place I’ll find even when I’m old

That bit about hearing the music inside her mind … that line, to me, is the song. Just imagine being Adrianne Lenker and having this overwhelming linguistic and musical talent. I don’t approach her gift with words, but even I sometimes feel alone in my expressive abilities. For Adrianne to have someone in her life who relates to her so well that she can hear the music inside her mind … I can’t imagine her wanting anything else in life or ever wanting to let that go.

The new “Big Thief” album “Double Infinity” comes out next Friday. I look forward to hearing it, and soon I’ll be seeing them live for the second time (the first was at the Pitchfork Festival in Chicago two summers ago.)

One of my children who just turned 18 is going through some challenging issues, even beyond graduating high school and starting college. To be honest, it all feels a bit like one of Adrianne’s songs. We don’t agree on everything, music wise, but we share a love of Adrianne Lenker and he always asks me to play her solo work or “Big Thief” on long trips.

We’ll be traveling to Atlanta in late October to see “Big Thief” this time, because Chicago didn’t make the tour schedule this time. Somehow, I think Adrianne would approve of this journey, and not just for the extra money in her pocket.